London, July 7.
History is made hand over hand so rapidly in this year of grace and destruction that human energies are overtaxed in keeping up with it. The transition from one century to another has offered ironical contrasts between Christendom organized at The Hague in a diplomatic campaign for the reduction of armaments and for minimizing the evils of war, and Christendom harassed and perplexed by the battle between white races for supremacy in South Africa and by the conflict between civilisation and barbarism in the Far East. There is enough in the rapid march of events during these distracted and momentous crises in current history to sober and appal reflective minds; and one puts aside his newspaper every morning with the conviction that the world has grown too serious, and that too much has happened over night. History has not always gone with so precipitate a rush. Explorers from the great Libyan desert have found cumulative evidence of the slowness and deliberation with which the earliest stages of human progress have been approached and passed. Burrowing deep in the sands, they have sampled the crude arts and deciphered the records of bygone centuries buried in oblivion. So true Is it that, although the changes and evolution of decades or generations may now be compressed within the compass of a single week or month, a thousand years are but as yesterday, or a watch in the night.
It is with a feeling of relief over evidence that the world has not always been in so driving a hurry as it is now that a visitor loiters in the classrooms of University College, where Professor Flinders-Petrie has collected the antiquities excavated at Abydos during his recent season of work. One table is devoted to relics of the early kings in the first Egyptian dynasty, and three tables and a window seat are covered with prehistoric objects antedating 5000 B. C. Seven of the eight kings of the first dynasty are represented in the collection, and two of their predecessors of even earlier antiquity, whose names are not yet known. There are fragments of the royal drinking bowls, bits of slate and alabaster once used on kings’ tables; a piece of a crystal vase once handled by Mena, the founder of the Memphite monarchy; worked flints, stone vases, carnelian beads and arrow heads tipped with red: and examples of the carving and metal working of seven remote reigns. To these fragments from the first dynasty are added stout jars, clay sealings and other pottery from the prehistoric period which preceded the line of the mysterious Mena.
It was in Abydos that the famous tablet with the double series of twenty-six shields of the predecessors of Rameses the Great was found and transferred to the British Museum; and from the Palace of Memnon and the Temple of Osiris one excavator after another has carried treasures of archaeology to the European museums. Where Marietta, Bankes, Amélineau and others have harvested, Professor Flinders-Petrie has been content to glean, and be thorough have been his processes on ground described as exhausted that he has been able to fill two Large classrooms with a remarkable collection of antiquities. He has found the missing links and practically completed the chain of history of the most ancient of recorded dynasties, and he is going back to the reign of Mena a few centuries, and is now piecing together the fragments which relate to an unknown race of earlier kings. These results have been accomplished by reworking the material and earth heaps which had previously been turned over and thrown away. A complete tomb, filled with jars and vases, was also found near the Temple of Osiris, and a cemetery on the south side of Abydos was worked for sealings bearing the titles of various officials of
the kings. In this way ancient history is reconstructed from ivory arrow points, bits of carved slate, pieces of gold foil and fragments of potteries. The reign of a king is filled out with something so trivial as a workmen’s wage roll preserved in pottery, or an earthen jar incised with hieroglyphs, or a slate palette for eye paint for royal eyes.
Professor Flinders-Petrie and his wife seem to belong in these rooms of Egyptian antiquities. Archaeology is their ruling passion, and so absorbing has it become that it seems to color their faces as well as their thoughts. The professor has thought about the potteries and flint work of the early dynasties until he looks like one of the early Egyptian kings portrayed in his own collection. His mouth has apparently widened, his features hardened and his color deepened, until with his stout figure, squarely trimmed beard and bronzed face he would serve aa a fine model for one of those prehistoric royalties whose names and identities he is striving to recover. Mrs. Petrie, tall, sunburned and far sighted, seems like a sphinx watching with stony look her king and lord. They have labored together in the deserts when the excavations have been in progress, and they have continued their studies and researches in London when their season’s work has ended; and although each is English by birth, they have become in aspect and expression as line a pair of characteristic Egyptians as can be found imaged or carved among the antiquities of the British Museum. They are to return to Egypt in the course of a few weeks to resume their labors among dust heaps and sand levels, and their faces light up with a fine glow of enthusiasm when their deliverance from London is mentioned. The present age, with its South African campaigning and Chinese horrors, suits them not. They are not entirely at home unless they are at least five thousand years behind the Christian era, and are then looking backward.
New-York Tribune, New York, NY, July 22, 1900